Don Graham, whose family owned The Washington Post for 80 years, published a touching eulogy for the newspaper’s sports department on Wednesday after he learned it was being eliminated by Jeff Bezos, the man who bought his family business.
“I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940s,” Mr. Graham wrote on Facebook.
Mr. Graham has professional experience with the sports department. Years before he succeeded his mother, Katharine Graham, as publisher of The Washington Post, he edited the section — a sign of the clout its pages carried in Washington.
In a video conference with employees Wednesday morning, Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, acknowledged that the sports department would be closed as part of a sweeping round of layoffs that affected hundreds of staffers. He added that The Post would reassign several of the section’s reporters to cover sports “as a cultural and societal phenomenon” and that the institution would maintain a section in print.
Mr. Murray said in an interview that the way sports content is delivered and consumed has changed drastically. Video has become more popular and professional sports leagues are increasingly telling their own stories. The sports media industry has also splintered into niche and broad providers of content, he said, and The Post needs to determine where it fits in.
“We have excellent sports reporting, and the very best sports coverage we’ve done does break through,” Mr. Murray said. “Generally The Post isn’t seen digitally as a major sports destination. So we’re kind of wrestling with some of those questions.”
The Post was one of the last bastions of great sportswriting. The disruption that wreaked havoc on newspapers’ coverage of local politics and business has also decimated sports sections around the country, hollowing out city rooms that once featured must-read reporters and name-brand columnists. A decade ago, The New York Daily News laid off its sports editor and pink-slipped a dozen sports journalists. The New York Times eliminated its stand-alone sports section in 2023, part of the company’s plan to fold its coverage into The Athletic, a sports site it purchased a year earlier for $550 million.
“We were the last great American sports section,” said Les Carpenter, a longtime Post reporter who traveled to Italy to cover the Winter Games knowing he was probably getting laid off. “It was a dream come true to be a part of it twice. The idea that it’s gone, it’s just heartbreaking.”
The Post’s sports section, which prioritized juicy investigations and in-depth profiles over dutiful team coverage, has been a national standard-bearer for the last century. It was home to Shirley Povich, an early advocate of racial integration in sports; Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser, columnists who revolutionized sports TV with “Pardon the Interruption” on ESPN; and Sally Jenkins, a Pulitzer Prize finalist whose byline is synonymous with eloquent and probing sportswriting.
The Post was also a champion of diversity at a time when the press box was overwhelmingly white and male. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, the editor in chief of The San Francisco Chronicle who edited The Post’s sports section for six years, said that The Post was a leader in women’s sports coverage, partly because it hired young women who went on to have successful careers.
“Editors there understood the importance of having a sports staff with a diversity of ideas and representation,” Mr. Garcia-Ruiz said. “That it was important to have reporters and columnists behind the notebook who looked like and could relate to the athletes on the other side of it.”
In recent years, the coverage included an investigation into sexual harassment at the city’s National Football League team, then known as the Redskins, under the ownership of Daniel Snyder. A 2024 profile of Kim Mulkey, the head coach for Louisiana State University’s women’s basketball team, which probed her at-times stormy relationships with players, was so searing that Ms. Mulkey threatened The Post with a defamation lawsuit in a news conference before it was published.
Although The Post has told the laid-off employees that they no longer have to work, Mr. Carpenter said that he planned to keep writing articles about the Winter Olympics for the sake of a “covenant” between The Post and the people who still love the newspaper.
“There are people who are subscribing to The Washington Post who want to read this Olympics coverage,” Mr. Carpenter said. “And I think I owe it to them.”
Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at [email protected].
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